Dance with the Penguin in real-time!

Mention this furry little aquatic bird to any online marketing specialist and most will recoil in fear. Well, the misinformed ones will anyway! But for the first time in the history of Google’s Penguin algorithm updates, there is good news. As you would expect though, there is some bad news too…

The so called ‘Google Penguin 4.0’ now is officially part of Google’s Core Algorithm, according to an official statement given by Google on 23 September 2016. Commenting on the announcement, Google said:

“Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.”

Penguin 4.0 – Will you sink or swim?

This change is something that we’ve been expecting at Onvigil for some time. The ‘real-time’ nature of this update should mean that ranking and subsequent penalties are applied much faster than in the past. This is going to be bad news for those SEO consultants whose tool bag is only equipped with crude and unwieldy tools. For the competent SEO professional however, it is going to make life much easier because sites should recover much quicker than before.

However, the news isn’t all good! The granular level of this new update will mean that sub-sections of a site may be under penalty whereas other areas are fully compliant. Although we will be able to see the impact of remedial work much faster, it will be much harder to pinpoint the areas triggering the penalty…

Google Penguin 4.0: The Facts

The Google Penguin signal (positive or negative) is now recalculated on crawl.

Google Penguin will now affect all levels of the site (domain, folders, pages, keywords etc).

Rankings will be affected on a granular level. This means it will be harder to diagnose small Penguin penalties.

More aggressively SEO’ed parts of a site can trigger a Penguin signal, while other parts remain compliant.

A large part of Onvigil’s work is focused on Google penalty removal. This is where Google penalises a site for poor SEO practice. Google will apply a range of different penalties which will reduce a site’s visibility in the search results. In extreme cases, Google will remove the site from the search results altogether, even for brand terms (known as the Google Death Penalty). Onvigil gets sites out of penalty and performing once again.

So more than ever before, you need an SEO agency who properly understands what Google is looking for. You need an SEO agency that remains vigilant at all times and one that can spot potential dangers quickly. Here at Onvigil we’re here to help.

If you’re concerned about this latest update and how it might affect your online business, get in touch today!